Dave Burke's Blog Archive: The .NET Years 2003-2012

Man, I’ve been getting so tired of those losers who try to boost their SEO rating by squirting their comments on my blogs like some disgusting bodily function. You know the ones, "I was very interested to know this information about you, and I really liked your blog. have a nice day!" Yeah, you too, asshole.

BlogEngine.NET has hidden captcha that blocks 100% of all automated comment spam attempts, but it doesn’t prevent people from manually typing in some inane comment with a link back to their wares. Beyond the excellent captcha in BlogEngine.NET, you can close comments after a certain period and you can turn comments off altogether, but that’s it. We, on the other hand, have the Sueetie Framework available, so why not restrict blog comments to Registered Users only? That’s what you’ll now find on sueetie.org and dbvt.com where on Sueetie.org anonymous users will see the message, "Please login to leave a comment. We require site membership for comments to build a stronger community and to reduce spam. Thanks!"

Since my dbvt.com is Sueetie-enabled I employed the same approach but with a slightly different message. The essential takeaway is that I figure my friends don’t mind creating a site account to talk to me. I initially used different terminology in the message, but I didn’t want search indexes to pull-up "dickhead" on each of my blog posts. For anonymous contact, there’s always the Contact form. To be honest I don’t get many comments anymore, so it’s not like I’m going to put a lot of people off.

Code work was extremely minimal. Three or four new lines of code to the BlogEngine.NET CommentView control, a bit of re-architecting and we’re done.

I don’t expect this to be 100% effective, as these people are not only outrageously stupid, they’re also without scruples. It will be an interesting experiment and I’ll keep you posted. Worse case, I can shutdown their accounts in Sueetie Administration with a single click and if they persist with different accounts, well, Sueetie needs a Email Verification Registration Component anyway.

A long time developer, I was an early adopter of Linux in the mid-90's for a few years until I entered corporate environments and worked with Microsoft technologies like ASP, then .NET. In 2008 I released Sueetie, an Online Community Platform built in .NET. In late 2012 I returned to my Linux roots and locked in on Java development. Much of my work is available on GitHub.